Neighborhood Threat

We left for vacation at 4:30am on Friday morning following the Community Board hearing, so I have not been able to chime in on the discussion until now.

I walked into that meeting feeling as though nothing we would do or say would have any impact, beyond making me feel better that I participated in the process instead of just sitting in my apartment seething. Since the club has continually ignored every single law they wanted to, I felt that nothing we did or said would make any difference. They hired an attorney at $550 an hour (at least) who walked in glad-handing the police captain and trying to take over the meeting and basically telling the committee that they had better approve the application or else, well, it might get approved anyway.

I didn’t want to be at this meeting. I had worked an insane week already, I needed to pack and finish getting ready, we had a very early flight out the next morning. We looked at everything that had happened and that we had done already and thought, we should just let someone else pick up the fight. Luckily, however, Studio B continued with their stupid quotes in the media and it irritated us to the point that we realized that we had no choice but to see it through. We canceled our Thursday evening plans (which had significant meaning to us), spent the weekend packing and running around with last minute errands, and cleared our calendars so we could attend. The only thing I didn’t have time to do was leaflet the neighborhood to encourage people to attend. My leaflet would have made the same points that Susan’s letter did, that we wanted the club to step up and be a good neighbor.

Everyone knows the outcome of the meeting already, so I won’t focus too much on that. What I did want to mention was a point that the Captain of the 94th Precinct mentioned, that there seemed to be a spark point at which the complaints started to go up, and that that was the roof deck. I hadn’t thought about it before that moment. If Studio B hadn’t built the roof deck, they probably would have been able to carry on and no one would have ever noticed that they didn’t have a cabaret license. It would have been annoying and we would have continued not parking our car on Banker, turning on the air conditioner at night even if it isn’t hot enough to really need it (to drown out the noise), and calling 911 and 311 when things got really bad.

But instead, here was the chain of events, starting a few months ago:

1) Todd P sent one of his normal Todd P notices about shows. This time, I decided to reply and say, Hey, todd, when you have shows at Studio B, could you ask the audience to please be respectful as they leave? blah blah blah noise drinking etc. His response: we are not doing any more shows at Studio B. It’s a terrible place, they treat the bands like shit.

2) The Grand Theft Auto party: As a feminist I can’t even go into the myriad reasons I object to Grand Theft Auto, so unlike other Studio B events, it lodged in my head. Additionally, it was a daytime event. So when I walked out of my building to take out the trash, the fact that there were several hundred skinheads lounging up and down that block of Banker Street was blatantly obvious.

I’ve said it before: frankly, i probably trust and like skinheads more than I trust or like hipsters. The problem is, of course, that there are always going to be people who come to these events to be assholes, and that’s what happened. It was hard to miss the lights and sirens later in the afternoon. Once the event was over, which happened to be about the time I headed down to Williamsburg, I walked down the block and was dumbstruck by the enormous volume of trash on the street. Because the club doesn’t have a no re-entry policy (like every other respectable club in the city), people come and go and walk to the deli and the bodega and the bar. They went and got sandwiches and cheeseburgers and drinks and sodas and booze and all of that crap was left up and down the block. Thousands of fliers for future shows at other clubs. It looked like a disaster zone. All of that trash was now going to migrate down the street and up the block and onto the property of folks who weren’t responsible for it, including my landlady and my neighbors.

3) The roof deck: I worked in real estate for about a year and a half, and that introduced me to all sorts of aspects of NYC I had never considered, like DOB permits, Certificates of Occupancy, and zoning changes. The changes to my neighborhood have made me blindingly aware to things like after-hours construction. So when they started doing obvious construction on the second floor of studio b, the first thing that I looked for was the permit. That was when all the pieces started to fall together: no permit. Stop work order. No C of O. Press advertising the roof deck.

You’re KIDDING me - they’re building a ROOF DECK?

The noise, the trash, the hype they built up around it, the reaction of the attendees of the club to the pending roof deck - oh my god. We moved to Greenpoint because it was a nice, quiet, residential neighborhood. I left the Lower East Side because I didn’t want to live on Bourbon Street any more. The club gave us BS responses, 311 was a joke, and 911, when we did call it, would result in an annoyed call back from the police when they showed up 40 minutes after we called in the fight and the bottles breaking on the corner - yeah, guys, at that point, it’s over.

that was when we decided we were going to fight back. We reached out to neighbors. I started posting on here. Heather became interested, since she doesn’t live down at this end of the neighborhood she wasn’t aware of the issues. Other people became involved. We learned about our rights and what the laws were and what Studio B was allowed to do and what they weren’t allowed to do. We learned how to call in our complaints to 311.

We went to our first Community Board meeting, and, well, you know the rest.

I’m going to go on record again as saying that not only do I find the cabaret laws draconian, I have demonstrated against them in the past. However, this was the only way I had available to me to fight back. I appreciate that the club came to the meeting with Susan’s letter and was ready to meet those ‘demands’ - except:
1) those are basic operational principles of running a club that anyone should know (it’s not like we invented them). and
2) why didn’t they just DO them and come to the meeting saying “hey, these are now in place” or “we’ve implemented 1 and 2 and have hired someone to do 3, it should be done by the end of the month.” Oh, wait, because IT COSTS MONEY. (So instead of just doing them, you’ll pay Ken Fisher his $550 an hour to get out of doing them.)

The best moment of the CB hearing was when they were asked about the roof deck and they kept insisting they didn’t have shows there.
“When did you stop?”
“Last Wednesday.”
They insisted there was just conversation, when I pointed out that their web site regularly advertised noted DJ’s spinning on the roof. And then, finally, the chairman of the committee holding up the C of O:
“This is your certificate of occupancy. It says: number of people allowed on second floor: Zero.”
“We’re having that inspected now and we believe we will pass the inspection.”
(I wonder how they’re going to change the zoning to allow that apartment on the second floor.)

Here’s what I really think about Studio B: I don’t think the “owners” (whoever they are - and I don’t really believe they’re the Polish people that were trotted out for these meetings, because the tax records and DOB records indicate otherwise) care about the community or anything about their ability to make as much money as possible - and, of course, as businesspeople, that’s what they should care about. I think they got greedy. I think they thought they were in a quiet neighborhood full of immigrants and poor people and that no one would complain, that no one would notice what they were doing or know if they were doing anything wrong. I think they got the roof deck idea and hired an architect who basically told them that they shouldn’t worry about the permits - that almost slipped out of Agnes’ mouth at the CB meeting when she started to complain about how long the City took to approve permits - and they couldn’t face waiting and missing the cash cow of the summer on the roof deck. So they just went ahead and did it.

When you move here from Iowa, it’s convenient to think that the city is your personal playground and what happens in the next neighborhood is not your problem. It’s convenient to be ignorant of demographics and the dynamics of the neighborhood. Your right to walk to a club when you feel like it does not trump the rights of the people who live in the area to the quiet enjoyment of their residences. There is a place for bars and nightclubs and culture, but if they operate in a residential area, they have to deal with things like soundproofing and security and noise levels and trash and laws and permits and regulations. End. No argument. Those are the things that Studio B refused to deal with.

It’s like the criminal with open warrants against them that gets caught not through sterling detective work, but because they ran a stop light. The roof deck was Studio B’s stoplight. This isn’t about morality, although it’s convenient to focus on it; it’s about breaking laws, repeatedly, and what happens when you finally get caught.